Before there was the Internet, there were BBSes. Those were really fun and exciting times. Everything was text based - the navigation, the text messaging and even the login and logout screens were coloured ASCII pictures of dragons, skulls, flames, etc. You could still download files of course, text documents, pictures, midi songs, and downloading an mp3 song was as big and massive tasks as it is downloading a high def rip of a movie today. Once you start downloading, you couldn't do anything else, except wait and watch the lights on your (external) modem flash. You would pray that the download would stay at the max possible speed all the way through (14 400 bps) so that the download would in fact finish in 15 minutes and no longer. When the Internet finally started becoming more mainstream, my official first dial-up ISP was outer-net. It's really good to see that they're still in business. I still recognize their logo as well. Most of the time, you would still get more optimal speeds from BBSes than from the Internet - navigating and loading times were a lot more favourable on BBSes since everything was text based. After outer-net, I moved onto FREE AOL accounts. There was a hack that allowed those 30 day AOL accounts to last forever... Hm..... ya, those were really exciting times. Then came cable broadband Internet..
Sunday, July 15, 2007
The History of My ISPs: Part 0
Before there was the Internet, there were BBSes. Those were really fun and exciting times. Everything was text based - the navigation, the text messaging and even the login and logout screens were coloured ASCII pictures of dragons, skulls, flames, etc. You could still download files of course, text documents, pictures, midi songs, and downloading an mp3 song was as big and massive tasks as it is downloading a high def rip of a movie today. Once you start downloading, you couldn't do anything else, except wait and watch the lights on your (external) modem flash. You would pray that the download would stay at the max possible speed all the way through (14 400 bps) so that the download would in fact finish in 15 minutes and no longer. When the Internet finally started becoming more mainstream, my official first dial-up ISP was outer-net. It's really good to see that they're still in business. I still recognize their logo as well. Most of the time, you would still get more optimal speeds from BBSes than from the Internet - navigating and loading times were a lot more favourable on BBSes since everything was text based. After outer-net, I moved onto FREE AOL accounts. There was a hack that allowed those 30 day AOL accounts to last forever... Hm..... ya, those were really exciting times. Then came cable broadband Internet..
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